Our memory of Sixties New Left radicals often evokes marches in the streets, battles with the police, or urban bombings. However, the New Left was a multi-faceted movement, with diverse tendencies. One of these tendencies promoted electoral as the way to change America. In every city that was a center of New Left activism, this "Electoral New Left" entered the political arena. A surprisingly large number of these New Left radicals were elected to office: City Council, Mayor, State Senate, even the U.S. Senate. Once in office, they persisted and prevailed. Cities and places we think of today as eternally liberal-Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, even the state of Vermont-were, deeply conservative and deeply Republican before the triumphs of the local Electoral New Left. These "Radicals in Power," however, brought about a lasting political realignment in their locales, and embodied the vision of a better future that was at the heart of all New Left activism. However, the accomplishments of the Electoral New Left, even its very existence, are almost completely unexplored. Historians of the social and political movements of the Sixties have focused on anti-Vietnam War protest movements, or on the Revolutionary New Left. Radicals in Power corrects that oversight and, in doing so, rewrites the history of the Sixties and the New Left. Based on interviews with the elected New Left radicals in each of their cities, Davin details the birth and evolution of a local and regional progressive politics that has, heretofore, been overlooked.

Long before Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Roddenberry, and Chris Carter, the names of David Lasser, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Hugo Gernsback, and Sam Moskowitz were well known by the first fans of a new kind of fiction. These pioneers were among the visionary individuals who launched the science fiction genre, which today enjoys such wide appeal.

Through exclusive interviews, Eric Leif Davin takes readers back to the late 1920s, when Gernsback, "the father of science fiction," founded the world's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. Lasser, one of Gernsback's editors, recalls his own amazing book The Conquest of Space-the first work in English to seriously probe the possibility of space flight. Other highlights include a discussion with the widow of Stanley G. Weinbaum ("A Martian Odyssey"), the first author to write about an alien in sympathetic terms; talks with the giants of early sci-fi Frank K. Kelly and Raymond Z. Gallun; Wolf Man creator and science fiction script writer Curt Siodmak; pioneer book publisher and writer Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; plus commentary on popular sci-fi magazines.

The lives, experiences, memories, and insights provided in Pioneers of Wonder are a treasure for all fans of this dynamic literary phenomenon.

This book explores the relation between democracy and industrialization in United States history. Over the course of the 1930s, the political center almost disappeared as the Democratic New Deal became the litmus test of class, with blue collar workers providing its bedrock of support while white collar workers and those in the upper-income levels opposed it. By 1948 the class cleavage in American politics was as pronounced as in many of the Western European countries-such as France, Italy, Germany, or Britain-with which we usually associate class politics. Working people created a new America in the 1930s and 1940s which was a fundamental departure from the feudalistic and hierarchical America that existed before. They won the political rights of American citizenship which had been previously denied them. They democratized labor-capital relations and gained more economic security than they had ever known. They obtained more economic opportunity for them and their children than they had ever known and they created a respect for ethnic workers, which had not previously existed. In the process, class politics re-defined the political agenda of America as-for the first time in American history-the political universe polarized along class lines. Eric Leif Davin explores the meaning of the New Deal political mobilization by ordinary people by examining the changes it brought to the local, county, and state levels in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania as a whole.

Anne Bonney had sworn eternal vengeance against the British Empire, which had sent a fleet to destroy her. But would the vampire in her own crew be more dangerous?

The Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 was a major struggle in the history of American labor. Over 25,000 Italian and Jewish workers shut down Paterson's 300 silk mills and dye houses for almost five months over the issue of workers' control of the rate of production. It was the biggest strike in Paterson's history. Workers overcame their differences in craft, nationality, and gender; and their democratic self-organization became a school in self-management. The workers invited the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to aid them. The IWW included a stress on the active role of workers in the strike and this revolutionary vision of workers' control reached its fullest expression in the Paterson Strike Pageant performed by the workers themselves in Madison Square Garden. This was a revolutionary innovation in theater and labor struggles which remains an inspiration to labor and the Left.

In the 1930s, ordinary people moved to create grassroots political movements which saved their communities. This is the story of how they did this in one New Hampshire town. It remains an inspiration to us all.